Ideas Storage Zone

Try to imagine how it would be if ideas were real, visible things. Imagine if every time you had a thought, it popped out of your head and fell on the floor. Now imagine this idea springing off to join lots of other ideas, throwing itself on top of a pile, a mountain of glowing, struggling, excitable, diverse ideas. Imagine if the mountain were made up of not thousands or millions of ideas, but billions.

Now you have a mental picture of the essence of the British Library. Deep down underground, nearly 400 miles of shelves hold more than 150 millions items: books, stamps, maps, musical manuscripts, love letters, lockable diaries, ship’s logbooks, plans for flying contraptions, recipes for pies and poisons. Every item contains hundreds of ideas – those invented by the author, discovered by past readers, and sitting waiting to be released by the readers of the future.

You can choose whether to follow the story of the Ideas Storage Zone or to watch the movie straight away. Click the image or link below to watch the movie, or move to the next page.